View Slide Show11 Photographs

Evelyn Hofer’s New York

By David GonzalezJun. 2, 2012Jun. 2, 2012

Evelyn Hofer’s photo assignments took her around the globe. But her biggest challenge was right in New York, her adopted home since the 1940s.

“It’s really hard to see new things,” said Andreas Pauly, Ms. Hofer’s former assistant who became the executor of her estate. “After a while, you get used to everything and you don’t have a fresh view.”

Yet judging by her work — from a portrait under the Queensboro Bridge (Slide 8) to an elegantly empty high-class hair salon that looked like a pasha’s tent — she saw many new things, rendering them with a certain timeless, urban quality. She did so with patience and attention to detail, using a large-format camera which demanded that she take her time: as she did with her assignments for travel books, she first set out without a camera to get a sense of the place.

“When I worked with her, she was always studying the light,” Mr. Pauly said. “She had a little notebook and would write down when the light would be good, then she would come back at that time. It was rare she set up a camera and did something quickly.”

The Estate of Evelyn Hofer42nd Street.

Ms. Hofer’s work is currently on exhibit at the Danziger Gallery in Chelsea, where it has proved popular among many people except for one group: museum curators. James Danziger, the gallery’s owner, said for many years Ms. Hofer — who died in 2009 — had been out of fashion among curators, never having had an American museum show in her lifetime.

That did not surprise Lily Renée Phillips, an artist and friend who shared a studio with Ms. Hofer on the East Side. She saw a similar reaction from fashion magazines when they hired her friend.

“She had a problem working for Harper’s Bazaar,” Ms. Phillips said. “Her pictures were sort of forever. But when you photograph fashion, it’s always changing what you’re supposed to photograph. She did portraits rather than fashion, and that was better for her.”

Ms. Phillips recalls visiting Ms. Hofer when she moved to Westbeth, the artist colony on the West Side, where her neighbors included Diane Arbus.

“I always thought the quality of Evelyn’s work was much better than Diane’s,” she said.

Though their friendship ended over a dispute, Ms. Phillips still recalls how Ms. Hofer brought her own sense of style to whatever she did.

“She could give you two eggs on a plate, and it would be beautiful,” she said. “It was simplicity and perfection.”